In a previous post, I wrote about how to create skinny WAR with Maven the DRY way: it was not the DRYier way to do it, as was demonstrated to me this week by my colleague Olivier Chapiteau (credit where credit is due).

His solution is far more elegant; it is reproduced below for reference’s sake.

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
    http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
  ...
  <dependencies>

    <dependency>
      <groupId>ch.frankel.blog.ear-war</groupId>
      <artifactId>war-example</artifactId>
      <version>1.0.0</version>

      <type>war</type>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>ch.frankel.blog.ear-war</groupId>

      <artifactId>war-example</artifactId>
      <type>pom</type> <!-- Here works the magic -->
      <version>1.0.0</version>

    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
...
</project>

That’s it! The beauty lies in using the WAR’s POM as a dependency as well as the WAR itself: it’s simple, DRY and effective.

From http://blog.frankel.ch/skinny-war-done-right